App fever at Mobile Health 2011

This year’s attendance was double last year’s at the Mobile Health conference, held at Stanford University May 4-5, 2011. The main theme last year was monetizing mobile health apps, without any real ideas of how to do so. This year the main theme was app fever – everyone either having or thinking that they need to have an app. No one seemed to be immune - large and small health service providers, physician groups, insurers, and entrepreneurs alike are scrambling to launch apps.

Rather than having each organization struggle through multi-platform app development,

what is needed is the GeoCities of mobile apps,

a plug and play platform where app creators can select different widgets for app customization. The most obvious mobile health app widgets would be for appointment scheduling, prescription management, lab test results, physician interaction, and EMRs.

Since app fever reaches far beyond the health sector, GeoCities/Dreamweaver-level platforms, much more accessible to the layperson than Google App Inventor and unified mobile code base tools, could cause even greater activity in the already booming mobile sector.

How small is small? the pico, femto, atto world

Man continues to master the manipulation of matter and timescales further up and down the chain from observable quotidian life. Regarding time, ultrafast materials is the area of science that deals with phenomena occurring in picoseconds and faster.

The familiar time scale is one second, easily measurable with a stop watch. A picsecond is 10^-12 of a second or 0.000000000001 seconds, a timescale used in high speed electronics. A femtosecond is 10^-15 of a second, the timescale of molecular vibrations and carrier interactions in solids. An attosecond is 10^-18 of a second, the timescale of electron motion at atomic levels.

Scientists are now finding in nature that most energy transfer and charge transfer transactions are typically taking place at the vibrational range, at the femtosecond timescale. A prominent example is the rhodopsin photoreceptor for vision. Traditional models for describing these dynamics, e.g.; Bloch’s single-electron band structure model, work for condensed matter but not for regular matter.

New models are needed to understand the interplay between atomic structure and electronic structure. Atomic structural dynamics deal with ultrafast chemical reactions,
ultrafast phase transitions, and ultrafast biological processes. Electronic structural dynamics deal with bond dynamics, valence charge flow, charge transfer, and electronic phase transitions.

One new tool being applied is the femtosecond X-ray. Since femtosecond X-rays interact with atomic cores, they are useful for obtaining direct information about atomic positions as compared with traditional optical measurements which only provide indirect information. This has immediately transferable implications in electronics manufacturing and biological applications.

Moving beyond the femtosecond scale, a next-generation light source at the attosecond time scale is being planned for the 2020 timeframe at Lawrence Berkeley Lab.

Rating ubiquity

Ratings have long been used in product and service reviews (Amazon, Yelp, etc.), and are now being extended to other areas such as real-time customer service (Tello). There are many other areas where ratings could be helpful.

For example, it would be useful to have an event rating system, the usual simple quantitative stars (1-5 or 1-10 rating) plus rich tag (both adjective + noun) descriptors for meetups, conferences, lectures, etc. Yelp’s ‘Review Highlights’ is a nice start at trying to summarize salient qualitative descriptors.

Rating systems could proliferate to other contexts too, with tag clouds being ascribed to individuals and organizations. This could be a step in filling in the missing pieces of job-seeking or online dating; helping to get an idea of what is it actually like to spend time with a person or organization.

Sage Commons Congress drives participatory medicine

The second Sage Commons Congress was held in San Francisco CA April 15-16, 2011. Conceptually an ‘open science,’ ‘data 2.0,’ ‘health 2.0,’ and ‘medicine 2.0’ event, the main purpose was for a variety of working groups to collaborate and outline goals for future work. The open science focal points for the group were data (aggregation, packaging, access, and usability) and public engagement. Of particular note was the launch of a new journal, Open Network Biology, which aims to facilitate experiment reproducibility through improved access to underlying data. The event is summarized here, and conference videos and presentations are available here.

The congress was an example of the growing activity in alternatives to the traditional conduct of health research and medicine, and important as an ongoing collaborative effort between many open health science initiatives. Alternative efforts could become a key partner in traditional health care delivery, particularly in realizing preventive medicine through measurement and intervention while conditions are still pre-clinical. Boutique physicians, health social networks, quantified self health tracking, patient-controlled health records, and patient-organized clinical trials could be important features in the near-term health landscape.

Personal principles of societal organization

In War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empire (2005), author Peter Turchin proposes a theory of history, that the rise and fall of empire can be explained by a society’s capacity for cooperation. Social capital as a prerequisite for society is further explored in other books.

The interesting point is what basis a society may have for generating social capital and cooperation. Historically, Turchin argues, societies self-defined and self-unified along meta-ethnic frontiers. In an enlightened society, presumably the definition of self/other based on ethnicity and geography recedes over time in favor of ideology. The new ideologies could be much more personal and granular than the wide-reaching religions, economic systems, and political doctrines unifying disparate peoples today.

A shift to group-identification by personal principles could be liberating at the individual level but potentially destabilizing at the societal level. One issue is optimal societal size: defense and administration suggest larger societies, but personal ideologies suggest smaller groups. Another issue is greater implicit dynamism: there are fewer natural barriers to entering and leaving groups, and at-will association would seem to be the norm. A third issue is potential conflicts between multiple associations, as a system inspired by Snow Crash franchulates with nation-states articulating value propositions to potential customers could develop.

At-will society: airsteading with the extropians over Williamsburg Brooklyn today and the immortalists in zero-G tomorrow

Reliable access to an objective reality

Already people obtain their ‘news’ from a variety of sources, a mix of traditional media and new media, especially tweetstreams and blogs (for example from NPR’s Andy Carvin (“The Revolution will be Tweeted”)). This suggests that more different versions of reality are being created and perceived.

The issue of ‘what is objective reality’ and reliable access to it could become more important over time. Reality-confirmation tools could likely proliferate. One example is the contemplated arrival of thousands of privately-owed microcams descending to film any situation of interest and posting opensource footage or auctioning it to bidders (proposed by David Brin in Kiln People). Like blogs and phonecams, private microcams could further counter the influence and propagandizing of media, and provide a more reliable confirmation of reality.

In the longer term, individuals may have a more explicit ability to manage the realities they access. Different realities could be shared at different times per volition and convenience (an extension of Nancy Kress’s shared reality concept in the Probability Trilogy).

Human language ambiguity and AI development

Since Jeopardy questions are not fashioned in SQL, and are in fact designed to obfuscate rather than elucidate, IBM’s Watson program used a number of indirect DeepQA processes to beat human competitors in January 2011 (Figure 1). A good deal of the program’s success may be attributable to algorithms that handle language ambiguity, for example, ranking potential answers by grouping their features to produce evidence profiles. Some of the twenty or more features analyzed include data type (e.g.; place, name, etc.), support in text passages, popularity, and source reliability.

Figure 1: IBM's supercomputer Watson wins Jeopardy!

Image credit: New Scientist

Since managing ambiguity is critical to successful natural language processing, it might be easier to develop AI in some human languages as opposed to others. Some languages are more precise. Languages without verb conjugation and temporal indication are more ambiguous and depend more on inferring meaning from context. While it might be easier to develop a Turing-test passing AI in these languages, it might not be as useful for general purpose problem solving since context inference would be challenging to incorporate. Perhaps it would be most expedient to develop AI in some of the most precise languages first, German or French, for example, instead of English.

Information broadcast with group messaging

Group messaging services allow groups to communicate in real time, through mobile apps or on the web. Multiple parties can interact, receive updates simultaneously, and possibly see the location of others and transmit their own.

Some of the big names in the space are beluga (acquired by Facebook in Nov 2010), convore, textPlus / GOGII ($15 million financing raised in February 2011), and groupme.

Group messaging is like many examples of NewTech - it was initially created to solve a problem, but through use, novel functionality becomes more obvious and new classes of applications are developed. In fact, it is starting to look like group messaging is not about communication, but rather multi-channel information broadcast.

One new class of functionality that is enabled is large-scale operations. Going beyond work groups and activity coordinating with friends, there is no reason that groups could not be arbitrarily large. An obvious recent use case is crisis management. Group messaging could be used for crisis alerts (for example, to issue the 80-second advance warning in the Japanese earthquake), and search and rescue. Another large-scale application is voting, or any kind of opinion-measurement. Presumably, group messaging could be a better version of the current real-time pulse of the web, Twitter. Twitter is operating at scale, recently reporting 36 million tweets during the 2011 Oscars, and more during the Grammys and Superbowl, but could benefit from the additional aggregation, stratification, and interaction functionality of group messaging.

Mitochondrial motility tied to neurodegenerative disease

New research suggests some details of how damaged mitochondria may be responsible for Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and aging.

Mitochondria are the energy powerhouse of the cell. They are managed and distributed via a mitochondrial transport complex involving proteins Miro and Milton which have KHC (kinesin heavy chain), EF hands, and GTPase domains. A pathway related to the functioning of the complex regulates mitochondrial motility through calcium concentration: the higher the level of cytosolic calcium, the lower the mitochondrial motility. Motility is reversibly altered as necessary to meet the energy requirements of any cell, including neurons.

Part of this same mechanism may be used by Parkinson’s genes Pink1 and Parkin to bind to the mitochondrial transport complex to permanently inhibit mitochondrial motility, thus blocking dopaminergic neurons.

Passive cognizance: outsourcing thinking to computers

Product manufacturing went offshore from the US and Europe to China. Infotech services were outsourced to India. What is next in this flat world? [Even more] thinking could be outsourced to computers. Memory already has been…spelling, navigation, and fact recall, for example. Several forms of thinking have been already been outsourced to computers too, fraud detection and geological data review in oil exploration are the canonical examples. Passive cognizance could be the futurepath of humans; even more on autopilot than at present, behavior facilitated by personal digital assistants like SIRI based on continuous incoming lifecam and biomonitor data and utility function reassessment.